The mistake that almost cost Bob his business

Bob had a startup idea. He was really passionate about it. The kind of passion that keeps you up at night. He opened a company and went to a famous web development agency to build his first prototype.

It was a typical agency project, a bit late, a bit over budget, a bit buggy. But in a couple of months Bob had something that he could show to potential investors and the customers. Some customers liked it, they were buying products. Numbers started to show.

It was good enough. For a start.

Bob got some investment money, hired a few developers, a designer, a product person and they began building on top of that prototype.

Progress was slow. It was difficult to build new features. The code was copy-pasted from one page to another as the startup wanted to experiment fast.

So Bob hired more tech people. They created even more code. They copy pasted code left and right. One file had over 3000 lines of code. That’s bad. Real bad.

Occasionally some customers would be overcharged. Sometimes, they would not be charged at all.

Bob had to employ more people in customer support.

Christmas approached and business seemed to be going real good. They nailed a campaing, leads were converting. Bob wanted to build more features, so he was hiring. Product people. Marketing people. The team grew. They all wanted features.

The tech team was barely floating. The backlog was a mile long. Marketing was waiting for their tracking pixels for weeks. Tech debt was growing ever bigger, until eventually no new features could be shipped.

All capacity was spent only on keeping the lights on.

Bob was furious. How could this happen? How incompetent is my tech team he asked!

… now this reads like fiction, but there are a few Bobs that I know personally.

The things is; you don’t end up in hell by suddenly dropping through the floor. The road there is long and twisted. If you make a wrong turn at every intersection it eventually gets real hot and there’s no time to backtrack.

Bob’s fundamental mistake was not having an experienced technical lead to challenge his assumptions. To oversee the agency work. To keep the tech team on track. To hire great tech people and grow them. To challenge requirements. To mindfully create tech debt and set aside time to pay it off week by week.

Bob did his best. But his best was just not good enough.